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Review: To the grammar born

By ROGER LEWIN

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, William Morrow in the US, Allen
Lane in Britain (April), pp 493, £20/ $23

There’s a cartoon featuring two cavemen who wonder aloud, ‘Now that
we’ve evolved language, what are we going to talk about?’ The joke has a
serious point: what is the function of language? Given its power of transmitting
information, there is an obvious answer: language is for communication.
Buried in this answer, however, are many more questions. When and how did
language arise in human prehistory? What is its nature? And how do we, as
individuals, so readily acquire the ability to speak in infancy? Philosophers,
psychologists and linguists, following the example of the two cavemen, have
been pondering these questions for decades.

‘People are more than curious about language – they are passionate,’
says Steven Pinker, who is a psycholinguist at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. The tenor of the putatively scientific debate over some
of these linguistic questions attests to this passion, which not infrequently
devolves to the level of insult and invective. One prominent linguist, believing
he had struck a crucial blow to a rival theory, recently concluded his scientific
paper like a noisome ten-year-old: ‘Nyahh! Nyahh!’ If, as Pinker says, ‘language
is the most accessible part of the human mind’, this bon mot says a lot
about this linguist’s thought processes.

With The Language Instinct, Pinker launches himself into the current
debate over the nature of language, and he does so uncompromisingly. ‘People
know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin
webs,’ he states. ‘Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright
posture.’ This pretty much lays out the prevailing lines of the linguistic
battle, and shows where he stands: proponents of innateness on one side,
proponents of learning on the other. Pinker’s book is a broadside from the
‘innatists’.

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The most prominent proponent of language as an innate, as opposed to
cultural, phenomenon is Noam Chomsky, who, like Pinker, is at MIT. When
Chomsky published his pioneering book, Syntactic Structures in 1957, he
challenged the prevailing wisdom of psychology and the study of animal behaviour,
namely behaviourism. According to the behaviourists, nothing existed in
the mind that hadn’t been put there through experience.

Two fundamental facts about language contradict the tenets of behaviourism,
Chomsky asserted. First, many of the sentences each of us utters or responds
to is a novel combination of words. So the brain must contain a program
that can assemble an infinity of sentences from a finite lexicon, rather
than be shaped principally by experience. Secondly, children rapidly learn
grammatical structure without formal instruction and are able to interpret
novel sentences well before they are two years old. Children must therefore
be innately equipped with a common plan to grammars of all languages. Chomsky
called this a Universal Grammar.

Chomsky’s dense prose and acerbic style of debate virtually guaranteed
that the subsequent academic discourse would be laced with rancour. Nevertheless,
Chomsky’s view became dominant, forcing linguists to focus on syntax as
the central feature of language acquisition – for a while. Amid mini-rebellions
among Chomsky’s acolytes, those who favour language as a learnt behaviour
have recently made a comeback, although not in the strict behaviourist
mould. So Pinker’s book is extremely important in its restatement of the
Chomskian position.

There is, however, a key difference between Chomsky and Pinker. Although
Chomsky views language abilities as the product of discrete brain structures
– a language organ – he argues that they are not the product of conventional
Darwinian evolution. Instead, he says, they emerged as a result of the brain’s
increase in size through human prehistory. It passed a critical threshold
with the emergence of modern humans, Homo sapiens. This is one reason that
many linguists dismiss as futile the search for a linguistic substrate in
the brains of our closest relatives, the great apes.

Pinker, on the other hand, is an ardent champion of natural selection,
and argues that spoken language, albeit in primitive form, began to emerge
very early in human prehistory. Chomsky has it backwards, he asserts: humans
didn’t develop language because they evolved big brains; brains got bigger
as a result of the gradual elaboration of structures that underlie language.
Natural selection honed the communicative powers of our earliest ancestors
as they began to develop a hunting and gathering mode of subsistence. Effective
communication provided an ever-sharper survival advantage in this context.

Pinker’s goal is to present the case for language as an instinct. He
does this partly through marshalling observations that others have made,
partly through his own work on language acquisition in infants, and partly
through other recent research on evidence for genetic influences on the
production and understanding of grammar. The power of the book is not in
its unveiling of a language gene, even though some newspaper accounts have
heralded such a discovery. Rather, it is in the elegant assembly of a coherent
argument, based on a foundation of evolutionary biology. Nothing in biology
makes sense, except in the context of evolution, a famous geneticist once
said. Pinker persuasively extends this aphorism to language.

Some of the examples of the discrete language deficits that result from
brain injury will be familiar to many readers. So, too, will the systematic
errors that young children make, in erroneously extending grammatical rules
to irregular verbs, such as ‘goed’ for ‘went’ and ‘runned’ for ‘ran’. Both
are cited as evidence of innateness as against learning of language.

The description of the patterns of inheritance in families with certain
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) conditions, will, however, be news to
many readers. A defective gene apparently disrupts grammar in these people.
Pinker is careful to point out that this does not imply that grammar is
controlled by a single gene, any more than the immobilisation of a car by
the removal of the distributor wire means that the car is controlled by
the distributor wire. A constellation of genes is likely to underlie language,
he says.

Pinker sets the notion of language as an instinct in the context of
viewing many human behaviours as the product of natural selection. Others
include an instinct for mental maps of large territories, what food is good
and safe to eat, and a knowledge of mechanics. Some readers may cry ‘biological
determinism’, and will wish to condemn Pinker for nasty fascist propensities.
Not so, he responds. In any case, ‘a blank slate is a dictator’s dream’.

By now it is hardly necessary to observe that The Language Instinct
is provocative. But there are no cheap points scored nor is there any intemperate
denunciation of opposing views. (Pinker reserves his invective for language
pedants: ‘It is ironic that the jeremiads wailing about how sloppy language
leads to sloppy thought are themselves hairballs of loosely associated factoids
and tangled non sequiturs.’) The case is intelligently structured, forcefully
argued, and couched in beautiful prose. Readers may reject Pinker’s conclusion,
but they will greatly enjoy the experience of the journey through his mind.

Roger Lewin is the author of Bones of Contention and The Origin of Modern
Humans.